


Snakebitten

by onpaperfirst



Category: The X-Files
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 01:26:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14153682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onpaperfirst/pseuds/onpaperfirst
Summary: season 5. redux ii through pine bluff variant. a chip, a bridge, lies.Sure, he said. We get along. I would tie a brick to my toe and jump off a bridge without her. We get along.





	Snakebitten

“We would rather be ruined than changed.” – WH Auden

_1997/1998  
_

The sky was a pale, apocalyptic pink. Blood in the bath. 

Scully drove north.

 

1.  
The chip was round and under a microscope the texture looked like fish scales. 

The procedure was over in ten minutes. Three tiny stitches at the back of her neck with a gauze pad taped on top. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.

Hours after Skinner left him in the hospital hallway—

“Fox?” He jerked awake when Scully’s mom squeezed his shoulder.

“Is she okay?”

“She’d like to see you.”

 

“Scully?”

He pushed the door open, not wanting to let too much light in. 

“You’re still here?” Her voice sounded rough and tired, but her eyes were bright and wild. She’d witnessed a miracle.

“You want me to leave? Your mom—”

“Of course not.”

He scraped a chair up next to the bed. “They didn’t have any cards in the gift shop for this particular occasion.”

“Have you been sitting out there this whole time?”

“I took a walk when Bill came out.”

She made a bemused “mmm” sound, then grabbed his hand and looked at it like it was the first she’d ever seen.

“Aren’t hands amazing?”

“You still on a morphine drip?”

She pointed out the bones in his hand, touching each of them as she gave their names.

He meant to make another joke, but they all caught in the back of his throat. The room smelled of carnations and bleached sheets. A mylar balloon dipped beside the bed: Get Well Soon!

“Oh. I got you something.”

He slipped his hand out of hers and took the gift shop Moon Pie out of his coat pocket. She held it delicately, like a blossom.

“So the gift streak remains unbroken,” she said.

 

Driving home, he missed her. He told himself that was silly. He’d see her tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then the next day. He’d been given an eleventh hour reprieve and there were once again boundless, infinite stores of Dana Scully. Her fingers on the cuff of his coat in a burnt coffee small town police station; her brisk, argumentative reports; her rare and exotic laugh. She only laughed at him. No one else. (“Not _at_ you, Mulder.”) It seemed to him a worthy goal to devote his life to, making her laugh.

 

2.  
The New Spartans had been watching Mulder since the summer.

 Special Agent Fox Mulder had security clearance. They couldn’t believe this guy was clean, but apparently he was. He had something of a reputation as an anti-government whack job even as the DOJ signed his checks. He was healthy as a horse, but there were medical records floating around from psychologists and hypnotists.

But the most important thing in their dossier on Fox Mulder was the fact that Fox Mulder’s partner was dying. Almost certainly dying, cancer chewing right through her pretty head.

She was admitted as an inpatient at Trinity in late October. An orderly they paid off had seen him, in her room in the middle of the night, sloppy crying all over the place. He was going to be a fucking mess if she died.

But then she didn’t, which was really too bad, because a man with nothing to live for also has nothing to lose.

 

3.  
A week after she’d gone back to work, he showed up at her door late, talking about the relative molecular stability of silicon. What was required to manufacture this kind of technology? 

“If we can figure out where your chip was made, that gives us a place to start. I know it’s not much, but we’ve had less to go on before.”

“Mulder.”

“And if we have a where, Scully, we can find a who—”

“Mulder.”

“What?”

“No.”

He was so guileless sometimes, a charming offshoot of his single-mindedness. His capacity for surprise, for disappointment, was seemingly endless.

“I know what you want to do, Mulder, and I appreciate that, I do.”

It sounded formal and bloodless, her _appreciation_ , considering what he wanted to do was hunt men down like dogs and extract information like teeth.

“But?”

“I don’t need to know. I don’t know if I even want to know.”

“We don’t have to do anything right now, we can—”

“It won’t change anything.”

“Someone did this to you, Scully. And what if you hadn’t put the chip in?”

She shrugged. Her kitchen was too bright. She wished they were in Mulder’s apartment, which would be dark, with streaks of masking tape on the windows and dirty bowls in the sink.

He stepped back from the chair he’d been leaning over. “You think it wasn’t the chip.”

“I didn’t say that.” She took a hand towel from its rack and refolded it.

“You didn’t have to.”

She sat down at the table.

“What good will it do, Mulder? I can’t spend the rest of my life trying to punish someone.”

He could.

“They put something in your body, Scully. Against your will and without your knowledge. And when you took it out, they killed you. Don’t you want to know who the fuck did that? And who gave you this chip? I mean, we’re supposed to just smile and say thank you? Be _grateful_? If somebody sets your house on fire and then comes back to put it out, you don’t thank them for putting it out. You ask them why the hell they dropped the match in the first place.” 

It wasn’t a match, it was a Molotov cocktail.

“Please don’t turn this into a fight.”

He pushed the chair back under the table with a little too much force. “Okay. Well. I should go.”

“Mulder.”

He paused at the door, hand on the knob. “No, you’re right, Scully. It was stupid. It won’t change anything. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

 

4.  
They had no business, either of them, having children. 

He’d gone through a dozen plastic bag fish since they’d met. Her dog had been eaten, either by an enormous alligator or a prehistoric lake monster, depending on who was doing the telling. Poor Queequeg.

Emily had been so small in his arms, feverish and sweaty, her little pajamas sticking to her back. His entire hand fit over the back of her head and it made his stomach lurch. He simultaneously wanted to never put her down and to pass her off immediately into more responsible hands.

He wasn’t to be trusted and neither was Scully. Everything they touched died. And yet he’d lied for her when she asked him to, had sat at a table and said she should be allowed to try to protect this tiny, fragile person who had been created to be killed. 

Scully believed she, alone, could keep Emily safe. The way she looked at a futile situation and insisted that the problem wasn’t a general one, but rather that _she_ hadn’t tried yet, it was one of his favorite things about her. 

No matter how branched and spliced and hybridized it was, some of Emily’s DNA had been Scully’s and that had made him feel wolfishly protective of her. This feeling had surprised him and frightened him. To be so at the mercy of another person for no other reason than _because_.

 

5.  
Scully sometimes paid lip service to the idea of wanting what she called “a real life,” but come on. Her mom’s friend’s daughter had invited her to join a book club. She said she’d go, then never did, because there was always something more pressing than some book about a Civil War widow finding love again. There was always a mangled body, an autopsy bay. There was always Mulder. 

She always felt a little nagging guilt after using those words: a real life. It absolved her of responsibility, for one, cannily implying that she’d easily have all that if it weren’t for Mulder.

And for another, it told Mulder that his life was silly, childish, lacking in meaning. She told herself that he knew what she meant, that he could take what she dished out, but she hated being mean to him. He wasn’t a joke, and she hated to think that he might think she felt that way.

And so she booked her trip to Maine without thinking, after getting back from Coats Grove and its bleeding trees. Her favorite pair of boots had a crust of mud around the bottom.

“Sleep in,” she told Mulder gamely. “Read the paper. Play basketball. Have a beer with the Gunmen. Enjoy a whole weekend with me out of your hair.”

“Isn’t Maine pretty cold this time of year?” he said.

She ignored him and continued proofreading a report.

 

Maine _was_ cold. Slate gray and salty. She wondered at her ability to be unimpressed by locals clawing their eyes out en masse. It felt like Mulder had orchestrated a hidden camera prank and would be jumping out from behind a tree at any moment. “Surprise! It’s an X-File!”

Wasn’t trying not to think about him the same, really, as thinking about him? A Zen koan. Mulder is and Mulder isn’t. She slipped deeper into the tub that wasn’t nearly deep enough, her toes cold on the edge. She should’ve spent more time booking a hotel. She tried to empty her mind.

Her mother had been thrilled to hear she was taking a weekend trip and had given her a copy of something called _Affirmations for Women Who Do Too Much_. She hadn’t opened it, but doubted that the book’s idea of “doing too much” lined up with any of the things she was actually doing.

She had stopped by Mulder’s the night before she left, dropping off an inconclusive autopsy report, and she’d wanted to pilfer a book off his desk, something well-thumbed and annotated with Mulder’s own marginalia, but she didn’t.

“Don’t miss me too much,” he said when she left, leaning out into the hallway as she walked to the elevator.

“Don’t worry.”

“Eat a lobster for me,” he said, and when she turned back, his door was closed.

 

6.  
There were two ways to recruit: money or ideology. The New Spartans didn’t have any money. They were up to their eyeballs in ideology. It was a trickier needle to thread when convincing an FBI agent to join your cause. The danger would be worth it. If you weren’t willing to die, you didn’t really believe. 

 

7.  
They ate barbecue at the Dallas airport, waiting for their flight. 

“Scully, do you think you could kill people if you were a vampire?” He was in a surprisingly chipper mood for the night they’d just had.

“For the purposes of this exercise, we’re assuming that vampires exist?”

“Goes without saying.”

She remembered a barbecue restaurant in Wisconsin three years ago as he licked the edge of his thumb.

“Assuming that vampires exist, and assuming that to be a vampire is to require human blood, then I guess I might. I imagine the urge for survival, even in the undead, is strong. But on the other hand: your exsanguinated cows.”

He had a whole file of them—not just the Texas Holsteins—slow beasts all over the world tipped to their sides and drained of blood.

“An ethical vampire. You would definitely be an ethical vampire.”

“And what about you?”

“Nah. Eternal life is a curse.”

 

8.  
In the dream she kept having, she couldn’t move. 

She wasn’t stupid. She knew what it meant. It was her subconscious, processing the feeling that she was not in control.

She knew she should probably go see Karen Kosseff or go to Mass or run one more mile or drink more water. She bought some new lipstick, same color as the rest.

Still, none of that could change what had happened to her.

 

9.  
Mulder leaned into her as she unlocked her front door. He was a terrible drunk. It was sweet—almost all anyone would need to do to get him to talk was buy him a few shots of tequila. 

“So. What did you wish for, Scully?”

He was warm in his black wool coat at her side, smelling faintly of salty bar food and cigarette smoke.

“If I tell you, it won’t come true.”

 

Her apartment was dark, only a light on above the kitchen sink and the small lamp in the living room. She leaned her cheek against the back of the couch, where the fabric was cool. Thirty-four and she couldn’t hold her liquor like she used to.

“You know, the way we’re able to metabolize alcohol changes as we age.”

“You’re drunk,” Mulder said.

“Mm,” she said. “Takes one to know one.”

His arm was stretched across the back of the couch and he reached a hand out to move her hair aside with two fingers.

“You always do that.”

She opened her eyes and he tilted his head against his bicep. They looked at each other steadily and he rubbed the strands of hair between his thumb and forefinger.

“Maybe you should get those little bangs you used to have.”

“Shut up,” she laughed, slapping at him. It had only been a couple of years. They’d both been so young.

“I’m going to start a fire.” He half-rolled off the couch and started rummaging around the fireplace.

“Mulder.”

“What? It’s freezing in here.”

“Captain Scully always kept his house at a brisk 68 degrees.”

“That’s perverse. Where are your matches? Do you have those long kind?” He walked back over to the couch on his knees and looked at Scully expectantly.

“Oh, Mulder. You’re afraid of fire,” she told him and then patted his cheek.

“Am I? But where are your matches? Do you need me to go chop you some firewood? I’d chop firewood for you, Scully.”

“I’m going to arrest you for being drunk and disorderly.”

He put his wrists together and held them out.

“Cuff me, g-woman.”

She circled his wrists with her fingers. “Go get me a glass of water, please.”

 

“I’m turning up your heat,” he called from the kitchen. “Send me the bill and tell Ahab I’m sorry.”

“You’re such a baby,” she said, tossing her coat onto a chair and unbuttoning her jacket, just to show off. She slipped her heels off and sunk her toes between the couch cushions. The heater clicked on and rumbled.

Mulder handed her a dripping glass and gulped down half of his own in one go.

“Where’d you learn how to use a sink?” she asked, flicking water at him.

“I was raised by wolves. So my mastery of the faucet is actually something to be admired, Scully.”

 

He liked being at her apartment. It was bigger than his, and it smelled nice, and there were always clean glasses in the cabinet and extra soap in the bathroom. He liked it when it got a little messy, too, a glimpse of books stacked up next to her bed and x-rays and lab reports and crime scene photos fanned across her coffee table. Pajamas on the back of the bathroom door and pictures of Bill and Tara’s kid on the fridge.

It was where she had been taken, glass under his feet. Where she’d let him in and laid him down, covered in his father’s blood.

 

She told him she was going to find a book from her childhood cryptozoology days, and five minutes later he found her on the bed, fully dressed, as though she’d sat down and had simply fallen sideways like a tree.                                                                                       

He knelt down on the floor and peered up at her.

“Scully?”

“I’m awake,” she said. “So just shut up, Mulder. I’m resting my eyes.”

“Hey, I didn’t say anything.”

“It was preemptive.” She tossed him a pillow.

He squashed it under his neck and stretched out on the rug. Scully turned onto her stomach and trailed a hand down off the side of the bed, over his chest, where he caught it.

He turned it over and around in his. “They say it’s your birthday,” he said.

“Please don’t sing,” she said into the mattress.

She fell asleep and he slowly rose, his knees creaking, and leaned down to press a kiss to her cheek.

“Happy birthday, Scully,” he said.

“Mmm,” she murmured. “Happy birthday, Mulder.”

He pulled a blanket over her and called himself a cab.

 

10.  
Mulder had agreed to be on the panel in Boston months earlier. He wondered on the train up if he should’ve warned the organizers. Maybe they could make an announcement before the panel. We regret to inform you that Fox Mulder is no longer entirely sure if aliens exist. Management apologizes for the inconvenience. 

He noticed the man in the hotel lobby when he was checking out, simply because he wanted so badly not to be noticed. He was pretending to talk on the payphone. He had longish hair, ten years out of date, and a Carhartt jacket worn to rabbit-ear softness.

At the train station, the man surfaced again, sat down next to Mulder, and said “Fox Mulder?” out of the side of his mouth. Mulder finished listening to a voice mail from Scully and then slipped his phone into his pocket.

“Who’s asking?”

“Good speech,” the man said.

“Thanks.”

“We’re interested in what you have to say, Agent Mulder.”

“Who is ‘we,’ exactly?”

The man cleared his throat and nervously flipped a tin of Skoal between his fingers. Mulder could tell he wasn’t used to this. He’d never done this before.

“You’ll be contacted.”

 

Two days later, directions were stuffed into Mulder’s mailbox, between a gas bill and dry cleaning coupons. His building wasn’t new or nice enough to have security cameras. People used an old, warped Yellow Pages to prop the front door open for friends or FedEx or the Thai place that delivered ‘til two.

 

There were true believers. There were Max Fenigs and Cassandra Spenders. Tremulous and fragile, susceptible to being sucked into cults.

There were conspiracists. Underground groups operating on the fringes that communicated via mimeographed pamphlets and old school mailing lists.

The New Spartans were neither. They didn’t give a shit about aliens. That wasn’t why they’d sent an emissary to Boston, to the forum where Mulder disavowed the past twenty years of his life. Boston had just been convenient. Away from D.C., away from the Bureau, away from Scully.

They wanted Mulder’s access, they wanted his anger, they wanted his frustration. They licked their chops, watching his madness shimmer and shift under the surface like napalm.

 

Mulder did his research. The first time the Bureau had taken notice of the New Spartans had been 1989, when a kid picked up on weapons charges in West Virginia started to talk. They hadn’t had a name yet. They were small and rudderless.

They didn’t seem to have permanent leadership until the summer of 1991, when Mulder found the first mention of a man named August Bremer.

The Bureau’s tactic seemed to be a glacial game of wait-and-see. For their part, the New Spartans had been relatively quiet.

 

He didn’t tell Scully. He’d been preoccupied with Cassandra Spender and her guileless, wide eyes and certain smile. She was calm in her prophecies. Mulder thought she was unwell.

But Scully was listening to her. Scully was listening and he didn’t know why. He didn’t understand her and it frightened him. He wanted to press his ear to her neck, listen to what that chip was whispering to her.

 

11.

“A Case Against Alien Life”  
By M.F. Luder  
Under review, _UFO Magazine_  

Aliens do not exist. Or rather, they may exist, and in fact likely do, but not in the way that I and many others have conceived of them over the past half-century.

In 1947, an object crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. It was the seed that brought forth years of reports of both UFO sightings and alien abductions, reports that continue to this day. Reports I have both made and believed. It’s often said that conspiracy theorists construct their conspiracies to create order in a chaotic universe, to a give framework and reasoning to bad things that happen.

What I posit here is not that these abductees’ memories and experiences are false or imagined, but rather that the memories and experiences are created by the U.S. government. Gray aliens and flying saucers have been a convenient scapegoat for fifty years of government experimentation on innocent civilians.

 

12.  
He’d played in two different half-court pickup games. His three was on and he was diving for balls, getting wood-burn on his knees and arms as he swatted them back onto the court. He tried to get a third game started, but everyone had someplace else to be. 

He was still standing at the free throw line, his t-shirt soaked through, his shoes squeaking, a monastic reverence for the hollow thud of the ball against the boards.

If he’d invalidated his life’s work, if it had all been an elaborate hoax, then what the hell was he doing? Could he spend the next thirty years in the basement, rubber stamping his way through Fiji mermaids and black holes? If not the basement, then what?

Violent Crimes? He nailed five more shots thinking about that. He hadn’t known back then how reckless he was, hadn’t realized how he’d let it chew him up and spit him out.

Scully stopped him from going completely crazy. Having someone who truly gave a shit what you did, what happened to you: it made you act differently. He’d been surprised to find this out, and a little confused at first.

Then, of course, there was Scully.

He had honestly contemplated his gun when Kritschgau had told him the truth last year. There had been a kernel of truth in the cover story for Ostelhoff’s body on his rug.

An elaborate hoax. A pawn.

He’d thought he’d been doing the right thing all these years. As hard as it was, all that collateral damage, at least he’d believed. There was the truth, and it would set you free.

But now, if it had been a lie, it had been a deliberate one and Scully had been sacrificed to it.

The thing about Scully was this: if she didn’t want to do something, she didn’t do it. She didn’t surrender truth at the foot of petty kindness. Even for Mulder. Maybe especially for Mulder. And even in his most self-pitying moments, casting himself as a charity case, he knew Scully would walk away if she wanted to.

But if she had been there these five years under false pretenses, if she had been there because she had been sold a lie, because _he_ had sold her a lie—

He reread the instructions he’d been left in his mailbox. It would be so easy, so very, very easy.

Burn it down. Burn it all down.

 

13.  
There were things a person shouldn’t have to get used to. One of these was seeing someone they loved in a body bag. 

He and Scully were in a dangerous line of work, but their record did seem to be something of a statistical anomaly. They were outliers, which he thought sounded about right. But it didn’t make him feel any better as he made the drive from D.C. to Pennsylvania to see if Scully was alive or dead on a bridge.

He didn’t call her mother on the drive up. Not until he knew for sure.

 

He was a harbinger, the dark shadow before the locusts fluttered to the ground.

“Mrs. Scully?” he always said, a question, the way her own children had said “Mom?” when they were about to burst into tears over something they’d done.

She remembered a look on Dana’s face, five years earlier.

“So, what’s your partner like?” It had been a question only meant to derail her husband’s interrogation of their youngest daughter on the topic of her new job.

“He’s…interesting.” In the space between words, Dana went someplace far away. Saw something in the air that no one else could see. Then she smiled, tucked her hair behind her ear, and asked her father if he’d read an article that morning in the _Post_ about defense spending.

 

In the hospital, that first time, it had been good to have Fox beside her.

Margaret Scully had long since stopped trying to parse out what Melissa did in earnest and what she did for effect. She remembered her oldest daughter starting a conversation with her in the waiting room about talismans, about how, when you got right down to it, a crystal wasn’t really any different than a rosary. Her sister was in a coma and she was talking about crystals.

And so Maggie was grateful when Fox came in with his caged animal energy, grateful to be able to turn away from Melissa before she got angry with her. Fox was unreasonable and unhinged, which gave Maggie purpose. She would be calm. She would speak for all of them, because Fox was clearly not capable of that at the moment.

His heart was in the right place. As a child, Dana did things just to prove that she could. She knew Bill thought otherwise, but this—Fox—wasn’t that. Maggie sometimes tacked him to the end of her prayers. When it wasn’t making her sick with worry, she found it funny: “And God bless Fox Mulder.”

 

14.  
Back in D.C., with Scully alive in a hospital bed, remembering nothing, he went to see Skinner without an appointment. 

“Have you said anything about it to Agent Scully yet?”

Mulder knew he had to be thrilled about this. Walter Skinner had never struck him as a ladder climber, but he wasn’t dumb. An agent under his supervision, infiltrating the New Spartans. It would look good.

“No, I just came from the hospital, but—”

“Good. Don’t.”

“Sir—”

“Look. Just…sit tight. Let me deal with this. Maybe we’ll pursue it, maybe we won’t. But keep it to yourself until a decision is reached. Okay?”

“I want her to be in on this. You know how good she is.”

“This isn’t a question of Agent Scully’s skill or competence, Agent Mulder. The fewer people in on this, the better.”

“It’s Scully.”

He was aware that he sounded weak and puppyish.

“And I am asking you not to say anything to her. Are we clear?”

“Yeah.”

Mulder blustered out of the office, kicking himself for not telling her immediately, then turned halfway back in to say, “Agent Scully’s going to be fine, by the way, I’ll tell her you send your regards.”

 

15.  
When he’d let Heitz Werber look into his head the first time, he was a few months shy of twenty-nine. Scully might’ve argued he’d been old enough to know better, except for the fact that she’d been twenty-nine when she met him, and that was possibly the least cautious thing she’d done in her whole life, blithely throwing her lot in with his. Who could’ve known. 

In his car, the parking lot of the medical building, she turned to him, hand on the door.

“The memories you have. Of Samantha and what happened to her. If you’re not sure of them anymore, why do you think anything I might come up with today will be any more reliable?”

“I don’t.”

“Well, that’s reassuring.”

“Well, why not? Why not try, Scully? I don’t have any better ideas. Do you?”

“So if all else fails, stick your hands in there and start digging around in your own head like looking for change in the couch cushions?”

“You’ve got the soul of a poet, Scully.”

He locked his arms against the wheel and peered through the windshield, as though a road were tapering into the horizon in front of him.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he said.

He turned and Scully smiled at him, an unsettling curve in her lips. She opened the door and got out.

 

16.  
 _ohgodohgodohgodoh_  

_Too many people watching, too many people listening. A metal table with light in her eyes. I had a baby. They made me have a baby. Oh god. No. How many ways can you cut someone open and put them back together? How many ways before they’re something different altogether?_

_Snow on the bridge. The smell of charcoal._

_ohgodno_

_You’ll find me dead. Somehow. If not now, here, this time, some other place, some other time, some other when. You’ve found me dead before._

_nonononogodno_

_Shapeshifter, bounty hunter, kill shot at the base of the neck. What am I now? I drove to the bridge. And I don’t remember. I don’t remember how I got there. Snow on the bridge. Lifting up. The smell of charcoal._

_The dam. The water rushing. Loud._

_They made me—  
_ _They made me—_

_ohgod  
_ _oh_

  

17.  
They were quiet on the drive home from Wiekamp Airforce Base, the squeak of the wipers and the splish of the rain. 

They held hands until they arrived back at their car and were allowed to go. They were tired. They didn’t care what the driver thought of it, if he saw it in the rearview mirror.

 

18.  
Addendum to File x00197321  
Agent of Record: Dana Scully

On Tuesday, March 3, 1998, this agent arrived at home in Georgetown at approximately 7:15 pm. On Wednesday, March 4, 1998, this agent was admitted to Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. at 11:34 am in serious condition, suffering from vasogenic shock, first degree burns, and slight dehydration. (Please see full medical records for details.) 

This agent cannot substantiate directly anything that occurred between 7:15 pm on March 3 and 11:34 am on March 4. This agent’s vehicle was found parked near Ruskin Dam in southeastern PA and towed back to D.C. Agent’s personal credit card had been used at a gas station in Bethesda; agent was captured on security footage obtained from said gas station.

In this agent’s opinion, she drove to Ruskin Dam of her own volition on the evening of March 3. Memorial Hospital (at agent’s request) did a full blood workup, testing for any drugs or unknown substances. Panel returned normal.

Please see tape of recording of agent’s appointment with Dr. Heitz Werber. Agent cannot substantiate the content of what was said during the session, but does confirm that it is her voice on the tape and further confirms that she did consent to the recording of her session. (Please see Harrison and Woodley’s studies in the _New England Journal of Medicine_ on the therapeutic efficacy of hypnosis and memory recovery.)

File x00197321 is considered open, for further investigation.

 

19.  
Scully asked Holly in records to put together a file for her on the Ruskin casualties. The folder was thick and well organized, with neat copies of IDs, death certificates, medical records, and newspaper clippings. 

Reading about them, even just a terse paragraph with basic biographical information, seemed the least she could do to honor their lives. She’d survived, somehow. Nothing but raspy little burns on her arms and her face that were already fading.

Sixty-seven people died that night in Pennsylvania.

She tried to give each one of them the time and respect they deserved. She hoped that someone would do the same for her. If you watched the news, they were cultists, lunatics, they’d burned themselves alive for some unknowable reason. It was the perfect trash tabloid story, a hybrid of the Nikes and bunk beds in San Diego and the flames in Waco, at Ruby Ridge.

The Bureau, who knows how, had managed to keep her out of the whole thing. Not one of the stories noted that among the survivors was an FBI agent.

A man who had taught high school English in New Jersey. A woman who owned a pottery studio that she’d opened in her retirement.

Marjorie Eldritch, from Glen Burnie, Maryland, had been fifty-four years old. A small community newspaper had run a short article about her death. “Local woman in PA cult death.” No children. “Eldritch’s husband, John, a government contractor, was reported missing in November.” It was written in the same, matter-of-fact way that it noted she’d worked as an accountant for over 20 years and that donations could be made in her memory to the local YMCA, where she’d volunteered.

_John, a government contractor, was reported missing in November._

A bad streak of luck for the Eldritch family. John _(a government contractor)_ goes missing in November. Marjorie is killed in March. No children. Pure grief distilled down to four inches of column space.

Scully went up to see Holly again, apologizing for taking up more of her time. She could never tell if Holly was annoyed or not. If she had a sense of humor, it was dry to the point of crumbling.

Holly looked up John Eldritch. Then Jon Eldritch, Jonathan Eldritch, and Jack Eldritch. No hits. She tried all of her arcane tricks, all the different databases she could think of where a contractor might be hiding.

Nothing. John Eldritch ( _a government contractor, missing since November_ ) didn’t seem to exist at all.

 

20.  
“The purpose of this, Scully, is to see if we kill each other. They’re trying to get the non-team players to eliminate themselves.” 

“We have to complete three more questions.”

Mulder groaned. HR had been hounding them since they missed the Fall 1997 FBI Team Building Seminar: An Investment in Partnership! at the Tallahassee Hilton. Mothmen were apparently not an excuse, and after dodging several makeup mini-workshops, they were sent a packet called “Partnership Puzzles: Team Building for Better Results” that they were to complete and sign, at risk of future paychecks being withheld.

“Share a negative experience with your partner. Your partner will then reframe the experience by focusing only on positive aspects.”

“Pass.”

“You can’t keep passing. We’re going to run out of options. We have to complete twelve out of twenty questions.”

“Do you really want to reframe my negative experiences, Scully?”

Scully went back to the sheet.

“Work together to rank each of these statements. Is the statement A. always true, B. sometimes true, or C. never true?”

“At least it’s multiple choice.”

“Please describe your choice in two to three sentences.”

Mulder groaned again, slumping down in his chair.

“Do you want to go back to the negative experience one?”

“I’m having a negative experience right now.”

“I noticed. Statement one. If you know the right way to do something it’s okay to overrule your partner.”

“Did you make that up?”

“No! But I’m going to tell you right now, the correct answer is not A.”

“Sometimes I’m right, Scully.”

“Mmhmm.”

“These are all going to be B. They want us to say it’s about compromise and staying open to the malleability of a situation and its particular needs. Even when the correct answer should be A.”

“I would argue, though, that the language here, ‘overrule,’ makes me inclined to choose C.”

“But sometimes I’m right.”

“I’m circling B. Statement two: It is okay to lie for your partner.”

“We’re going to get fired for our answers to these, you know that.”

“They want us to say that we wouldn’t lie about something big.”

He raised his eyebrows, a trick he’d learned from her.

“Something big that was done for the wrong reason,” she said, thinking about the man under a white sheet on Mulder’s rug.

“We never do things for the wrong reasons,” he said.

Scully circled B again.

“Statement three: It is okay to lie to your partner.”

“C,” Mulder said quickly.

“C,” Scully agreed, circling it. Never true.

 

21.  
Plans were made for Mulder’s infiltration of the New Spartans in a sunny, third-floor conference room. Huge potted plants were staggered between the windows and there was a print of a sailboat on one wall. The CIA was there. 

Out in the hall, after the meeting, Skinner stopped him.

“Did you consider it, Agent Mulder?” 

“Excuse me?”

“If I’m not mistaken, you were in Boston on a Saturday, Agent Mulder. You didn’t inform me until five days later. Did you consider it?”

Mulder looked at him. If Skinner had been a smaller man, he might’ve seemed turtleish, his bald head, his shiny glasses.

“No,” Mulder said.

 

22.  
She didn’t tell Mulder about the casualties file. And she didn’t tell him when she went to the address on Marjorie Eldritch’s photocopied driver’s license. 

It was a small, neat house on a quiet street. There was a concrete goose in a yellow rain slicker on the front stoop. Several wet newspapers piled up at the door.

Scully picked the lock, wearing elegant driving gloves her mom had given her for Christmas. Probably not what she’d had in mind. The house had been tossed. Someone had already been there looking for something.

Scully kept her flashlight low, below the window line, as she moved through the house. In the kitchen, there were mugs in the sink and TV dinner boxes in the trash can. Prescription bottles next to the small TV on the counter: Paxil, Ativan, Ambien. A jar of Folgers crystals and a ceramic frog with an open mouth holding a scrubber.

She pictured Marjorie eating dinner at the kitchen table, alone, before driving to Pennsylvania. She’d been ID’d with her dental records.

There’d been a computer in a small guest room, but the tower had been taken, leaving just the monitor and a mouse, dangling from the desktop. Scully knelt to look through papers that were spilling from a toppled filing cabinet, but they were car titles and bank statements. Nothing.

The place had already been ransacked, so what were a few more books on the floor, a few more boxes overturned. She methodically went through each room, putting herself in Mulder’s shoes. Because who else better to figure out where you’d hide something important.

She pried off outlet covers and dug through the soil of a potted fern. In the kitchen, she dumped out oatmeal, flour, brown sugar. It was a bag of chopped broccoli in the freezer that bore fruit.

She dumped it out in the sink, where something clinked. She plucked out a key card. Tiny, wet pieces of broccoli were stuck to it. It was thin and silver, with no lettering or any other identification. A shiny black strip ran down the back.

 

23.  
The New Spartans house was in the middle of a field in Virginia, a scrubby copse of maples near the back. Paint peeled from warped siding and Mulder parked at the end of a driveway that was really just two long, worn tire tracks. 

There was a months-old pumpkin on the porch, fuzzy with mold, its toothy grin collapsing in on itself. When Mulder’s boot landed next to it, a flock of drowsy, midwinter flies stumbled out of the eye socket.

He’d spent the entire forty minutes in the car trying to talk himself out if it, then reminding himself he’d been the one to go to the Bureau in the first place.

As he crawled closer and closer, turning onto a skinny rural route, he kept glancing at his cell, unsure if he was willing it to ring or not. He knew if she knew she would save him and she would be furious, clacking around in those heels of hers. He wanted to get in and out of here as quickly as possible.

A kid answered the door. An honest to god, actual kid, a grubby boy of about eight. He looked like something out of _The Grapes of Wrath_. Dirty hair, Kool Aid around his mouth, and a woebegone look that might turn into sour meanness in a few years.

“Hi,” said Mulder.

The kid wiped his nose with the back of his hand and wordlessly let go of the screen door. It bounced into Mulder’s shoulder with a whine. The kid trailed into the kitchen, leaving Mulder to let himself in.

Mulder squinted in the dim light. Who the hell would bring their kid here? He looked into the yellow kitchen, where the kid was folded into a chair, coloring and watching _Mama’s Family_ on a little black and white set.

“They’re downstairs,” the kid said without looking up.

 

The basement was wood paneled with orange shag carpet. It stunk of mold.

How long have you been interested in dismantling your country’s government from within? Which country’s immigrants pose the largest threat to the American way of life? What can you steal for us? Are you ready to kill? What kind of shot are you? What kind of firearms are you most comfortable with? Can you get us more firearms? What about explosives? Will you fuck up and tell our secrets? How much pain will get you to talk? This much? This much?

“Your partner,” Haley said. There was no sign of Bremer. Jacob Haley, who looked like a soft around the middle office drone who’d steal your Diet Coke from the fridge and drink it right in front of you, was the one in charge here.

“Yeah,” Mulder said casually, ice water flooding his veins.

“What’s her story?”

He knew Scully was a her. How did he know Scully was a her? Of course he knew. What else did he know?

“What do you mean, what’s her story?”

“How long have you been partners?”

“About five years.”

The toothpick between Haley’s teeth was flat and splintered. “Long time.”

“I guess.”

“Is she gonna be a problem for us?”

She she she.

“A problem? A problem how.”

“A problem however.” He waved his hand like someone who didn’t care what topping you ordered on the pizza. “Thing is, Agent Mulder, people tend to underestimate even their closest associates’ innate curiosity. It’s a problem. Wives are problems. Girlfriends are problems. So a problem like that is what I mean. She nosy? She ask a lot of pain in the ass questions all the time?”

“She’s not gonna be a problem.”

“You get along, you and your partner?”

“Sure.”

Sure, he said. We get along. I would tie a brick to my toe and jump off a bridge without her. We get along.

“Are you prepared to kill?” Haley asked again.

“Is this a trick question? You already asked that. The answer is still yes.”

“Would you kill _her_?” His eyes narrowed, a tight grin played on his chapped lips. “If you had to.”

 

Even if “yes” were a lie, even if he didn’t mean it, he’d said it and it counted for something.

He excused himself and threw up a little in the bathroom sink.

Would you kill her? If you had to.

He stuck his head under the faucet and rinsed his mouth out. Trying to get rid of the image of Scully that had appeared, unbidden, in his head. Skin powdery and thin, purple bruises under her eyes. The way her head had lolled against the hospital pillow, the smell of sickness, the smell of death. Would you kill her? In a hospital bed with a bullet between her eyes.

He blew his nose with their cheap toilet paper and flushed, hoping he hadn’t taken too long, hoping they hadn’t heard him retch.

 

24.  
She took the key card to the Gunmen. 

“I didn’t used to be like this,” she said conversationally.

Byers had connected some kind of scanner to the big old desktop computer and swiped the card from the bag of frozen broccoli. Now he tapped at the keyboard, eyeing Scully, unsure of what to say.

“Then again,” she continued, holding a heavy paperweight to her eye, a scorpion floating inside, “I never had a reason to be. It’s an interesting thing, people wanting you dead.”

She rubbed her fingerprints off the bubbly glass with the sleeve of her coat and placed it back on top of a stack of back issues of _The Lone Gunmen_.

“Huh,” Byers said, moving closer to the monitor.

“What?” Scully leaned next to him. The screen was unintelligible to her, strings of letters and numbers.

“You’re going to have to translate for me, Byers.”

And just as he was pointing at a line of code, the screen went blank, the letters and numbers disappearing in rapid succession like a line of dominoes.

“What the hell. Byers, what was that?”

Byers hit a few keys and jiggled the card machine. Nothing. The screen remained resolutely blank, a cursor blinking dully at the top left corner. All gone.

 

25.  
Mulder’s first task from the New Spartans was easy. Drive to a train station in Crystal City, retrieve a manila envelope from a locker. Hold it until you receive further instructions. 

This was a test, meant only to see how good he was at following orders and how bad he was at not asking any questions. Skinner and Leamus, from the CIA, debated opening and resealing it, but it seemed too risky this early in the game. If Haley thought Mulder had opened it, who knows what he’d do.

And so the envelope sat in Mulder’s apartment for four long days. He was contemplating it when his phone rang. He shoved it in a desk drawer.

 

Scully sounded sad and far away, like there were oceans and deserts between them.

She usually didn’t call him on Friday nights. What would she have done on Friday nights with a kid, with small, silent Emily? God, he felt like an asshole, halfway jealous of a dead child. He couldn’t quite imagine it, but thought it would involve things like pizza with whole wheat crust, picture books about Marie Curie, and hypoallergenic bubble baths.

“I’m growing mold,” she said as she rattled through her fridge. “You should see this carton of blueberries. I might have penicillin in here. You’d be impressed.”

There was a staticky hiccup on the line, like the pop at the end of an album.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” he said, too loudly.

“That click.”

He’d mostly assumed for the past six or seven years that every phone he used was tapped. He had Byers come over every few months to do a thorough sweep. And he hadn’t talked to Skinner about the New Spartans over this phone, or any phone, for that matter, nothing but face to face. But the idea of Haley hunched over, listening to him talk to Scully, made him crazy.

“What click?”

“There was a little clicking noise.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Oh. I guess you’re rubbing off on me, huh?”

“I guess so. Look, Scully, you want to come over?”

“Now?” Her voice was low and hopeful. He worried sometimes that theirs was a relationship built on mutual pity. But then again, maybe all relationships were.

 

Haley called at quarter to two.

They were asleep on the couch, Scully curled up under the blanket, her toes tucked under his leg. Mulder managed to catch the phone after only a ring and a half, almost knocking the remains of a container of sweet and sour chicken to the floor. A chopstick flipped out and landed on his foot.

Scully didn’t wake up because she never woke up. He picked his way through the living room and into the too-bright kitchen.

“Rise and shine, Agent Mulder.”

 

Scully woke up two hours later on his couch. She had a vague memory of the phone ringing, of the click of the front door. Mulder wasn’t on the couch, wasn’t anywhere else in the apartment, and she was deeply grateful for that. She didn’t let herself think too hard about where he might be.

Part of her wanted to curl up again and finish the night, the same lazy, slothful part that had hoped, as they watched the _Seinfeld_ rerun after the news, that Mulder would offer to rub her feet. She’d zoned out once while he was talking about ayahuasca rituals, imagining his big hands wrapped around her foot, his thumb sliding against her arch.

She gathered the boxes from dinner, put three beer bottles in the recycling bin, folded the blanket back up, and left.

 

26.  
Mulder got a cheap coffee at the fake 7-11 at the end of his block that was open all night. As he pulled out, a raccoon darted into the road. It turned its bandit face as Mulder slowed, then disappeared into the weedy foliage of a storm drain. 

The address was a self-storage place on the edge of the middle of nowhere. A U-STOR-IT sign buzzed in the quiet night like a bug zapper. Mulder huffed into his hands to keep warm as he waited in front of unit 374 as directed. He checked his watch, both to keep time on Haley’s arrival and to guess when Scully might wake up back at his apartment.

Haley showed up with a dark-haired man. He didn’t look familiar from any of the CIA files Mulder had seen, and he’d seen a lot of them. He was wearing a black hoodie and jeans, but something about him felt more businesslike than any of the flunkies Mulder had already met, kids who were mostly high school dropouts with records who couldn’t get into the military or law enforcement but still wanted to use a gun.

Mulder nodded to the man and he nodded back, a quick acknowledgement of two people doing bad things.

Haley unlocked the door and slid it up. The unit was empty except for a couple of white barrels in the back. Fertilizer? Mulder couldn’t tell.

“Well. Go ahead,” Haley said, leaning against the wall and crossing his arms.

Mulder handed the man the envelope.

“Don’t be shy. You can check it. It’s all there,” Haley said.

The man opened the envelope, turning slightly away from Haley and Mulder to check on his delivery. He pulled the papers out halfway, fanning through them quickly.

And as he started to turn back to them, his back tensing like an animal, starting to say “Hey—” Haley was waiting. He reached to the small of his back and pulled out a gun.

The man hit the concrete floor, the envelope and papers spilling out around him.

“Get the envelope.”

Mulder could smell the sting of gunpowder and the iron in the man’s blood that was slowly expanding outward from his head.

His hand was still gripping the envelope and when Mulder tugged it, the fingers relaxed and uncurled.

“Look at the papers,” Haley said.

They were blank. Every single one.

“What the hell is going on?”

“He ratted us out. You know what he was going to do with what he thought he was getting? He was going to sell it.”

“To who?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“So why’d you need me?”

“If you knew there wasn’t anything in that envelope, would you’ve come out here with me? You did good, FBI Agent Mulder. Now let’s get the fuck out of here.” Haley yanked the door of the unit down, leaving the man’s body lying on the ground behind it.

As he locked the door, he laughed. “You shoulda seen the look on your face.”

 

Scully was gone when he got home. She’d cleaned up, but her earrings were sitting on the table, two small pearls. Mulder sat down on the couch and picked one up, twirling it between his fingers. He remembered her taking them off, rubbing her ears roughly.

He tried to sleep, as though the sun weren’t about to rise, pretending he hadn’t just walked away from a dead man. Pretending he hadn’t done that before.

 

27.  
The sky was a pale, apocalyptic pink. Blood in the bath. 

Scully drove north, alongside fallow fields. She had to use a map to navigate, which was a relief. She really did remember nothing and neither did her chip.

 

28.  
“I’m at Ruskin Dam.” 

Her voice had been even. Her voice was always even. Had she said “I’m fine”? He didn’t think so, but who could ever tell if that boded well or ill, because “I’m fine” from Scully could mean “No thanks, I’m too full for another slice,” or it could mean “I have been shot multiple times and am presently in danger of bleeding out.”

But fucking Ruskin Dam. Ruskin Dam.

Scully in a body bag. Scully on a stretcher. The smell of charcoal and sticky burn gauze on her hands. Fuck. _I’m fine._

He was due at the house in two hours, scheduled to give the New Spartans blueprints to a government facility outside of Baltimore. He’d gotten them that morning from Skinner, who had clenched his jaw when Mulder told him about the dead man in the warehouse. They were still no closer to knowing what, exactly, the New Spartans were planning.

But he couldn’t be at the house in two hours, because he was driving to goddamn Pennsylvania because Scully was at Ruskin Dam.

As it stood, they weren’t quite in love with him. He’d passed the test last night, but his nerves jangled in spite of his preternaturally bored face. Haley hadn’t been explicit about it, he even treated Mulder better than he needed to, but there was something dark that flickered in the back of his eyes any time they landed on Mulder. Haley needed him, but he found Mulder’s position distasteful. If he’ll rat on them, he’ll rat on us.

He’d already blown off one other meeting, a week earlier. He’d argued with Skinner about it. If Scully knew, they wouldn’t have to do this, this pretend bullshit, this cloak and dagger routine.

 

And so as he eased onto the highway, he called the house.

“I’m not coming,” he said to the kid who answered the phone. Jimmy or Brendan or Seth, one of those dim bulb burnout kids with buzzcuts and raw, peeled potato skin.

There was a cough, a whisper, and some rustling on the other end as the phone was passed to Haley.

“Something came up,” Mulder said.

“Really. And that something would be?”

“I have to wash my hair.” He punched the passenger seat and bit his lip. His smart mouth was gonna get him killed.

“You did better than I’d expected last night.”

“You’re gonna make me blush. Listen,” he amended, thinking about blood on the concrete floor, “do you want me to blow my cover with my partner? Because if I come tonight, that’s gonna happen. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have to. I really wouldn’t.”

“You said the same thing last week, Agent Mulder.”

“What, so I’m not being creative enough? I don’t know what you want from me. I have a job, Haley. So here are our choices, as far as I can tell. I come tonight, I blow my cover, we’re fucked. If she finds out, I promise you she will go to the Bureau so fast it’ll make your head spin. She does not fuck around. But I’m sure you already know that. Or, and I’m leaning toward door two, here: I meet you at a later date, bring the blueprints then, none of us hang for treason.”

There was a long pause. The click of a lighter. Haley exhaled.

“Strike two,” he said, and the phone went dead.

 

29.  
Mulder took the same route he’d taken a month ago. He was almost-not-quite angry with her, which he knew was stupid and petty and uncharitable and mean. He congratulated himself on at least realizing that. Because why? Because someone else—because _Scully_ —had the nerve to be fucked up and confused? 

You, Fox Mulder, do not have a monopoly on grief and fucked-upedness. You are not the center of the universe.

Though it should be said: constant surveillance does tend to wreak havoc with one’s concept of self-importance in terms of the larger picture.

 

When he was about fifteen minutes out from the dam, he noticed a pickup in the rearview mirror. It was too close. Shit. He hadn’t been paying attention. He’d been on the phone with Haley on his way out of D.C. and he should’ve been careful, but he wasn’t.

Probably nothing, he told himself. He checked the speedometer, kept his foot steady on the gas, trying to gauge if the truck was mirroring him.

When he turned off the main road without a blinker, the truck sped past. Nothing. It was nothing. Just some old guy in a truck, riding the bumper of a city asshole who was driving too slow. He wasn’t being followed. No one knew he was here.

 

30.  
She was parked where the emergency vehicles had been. He rapped on her window with the back of his knuckle and raised a palm. 

Hello—we come in peace—don’t shoot. Stop in the name of love.

She cranked her window down.

“Are you okay?”

She handed him the file before rolling the window back up and getting out of the car.

“Thanks for coming, Mulder.” She put her hands on her hips and looked at the bridge as if she’d just gotten there, the way she always surveyed a crime scene upon arrival.

“Where was I?” she said. “When you got here, where was I?”

He’d driven 80, 85 most of the way there. _Ruskin Dam_ beating against his skull. And here she was, calmly pacing off the distance between the bridge and her car.

He didn’t know what to do, so he went ahead and walked off a few strides, estimating where the triage tent had been.

“I don’t know where they found you,” he said. “You were already on a stretcher when I got here. They were taking you to the ambulance.”

He reached out and touched her back. “Scully.” She flinched and strode purposefully onto the bridge, looking up at its studded beams and supports, and then down at the dark water below.

“Where was my car?”

He shoved his hands in his pockets and started walking wordlessly up the road. She followed him and they walked about an eighth of a mile, their breath on the air. Spring was never going to come.

There was an opening in the trees where the grass was worn bald. That’s where she’d been parked.

“What else?”

“What do you mean, what else?”

He’d banged on the windows of her car, he’d looked in the trunk.

“What else do you remember? What else wasn’t in the report?”

She was getting that pinched sound in her voice, the verbal toe tap she did when she thought he wasn’t telling her something.

“Why are we here, Scully? No. No, I know why I’m here. I’m here because you called me. Why are you here?”

“What else do you remember, Mulder?”

“Before we take a walk down memory lane, Scully, I’d really like to know what the hell you’re doing here.”

Her eyes narrowed and her breath went shallow. He stepped towards her, spoiling for a fight. _I’m the one who gets to be fucked up_ , a mean little voice in his head growled.

“No, I want to know. You want to remember? Is that it? You needed to come back to fucking Ruskin Dam to _remember_? Is this stop number one on a greatest hits tour of places to remember? Where to next, Scully? Skyland Mountain? Philadelphia?”

She wanted to hit him, wanted to make him bleed. _Philadelphia_. Jesus, he was such a jealous asshole sometimes. She wanted to lick her lips and toss her hair and get up close to his face and whisper, I wish I’d never met you, Fox Mulder.

“Are you kidding me? Your whole life—God, _my_ whole life, Mulder—is in service of finding out if what you remember is really what you remember. You’ll fucking drill a hole in your head to remember. And yet _this_ is a problem. One afternoon? Two hours in the car? Really?”

“It’s not that—”

“You can’t give me that, Mulder? Are you really that selfish? You can’t shut your goddamn mouth for five minutes and help me?”

“Jesus, Scully—” He listed backwards like she’d shoved him.

“I called you because I wanted you to be here. Because I _needed_ you, okay? So don’t say anything. I swear to God, Mulder, don’t say anything.”

She sat down on the bench of a picnic table, her fingers shaking as she dug her nails into the soft wood.

He walked toward the edge of the woods and his hand flew at a tree, glancing off the bark.

“Fuck.” He knew it was stupid even as he was doing it, because what, did he want to break his damn hand?, but it felt good, the same way it feels good to snap a rubberband against your wrist.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” she said mildly.

His knuckles came away raw. He flexed his hand and shook it out.

“Look. It’s just a bridge, Mulder. A bridge and some water. That’s all it is.”

“Well, I thought you were dead. So.”

Unbelievably, in his opinion, she scoffed at this. “I’ve thought you were dead plenty of times, Mulder.”

“Is it a contest?”

She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, blue veins of lighting against the black.

“You do realize,” he said, “that you may be the only person on earth who could take someone worrying about whether or not you were dead and turn it into a fault.”

“But I wasn’t dead.”

“No, you weren’t.”

Dead, almost dead, back from the dead, not dead at all. She had always assumed it was binary: there was dead and there was alive. It turned out there were variations on a theme.

“So who’s the winner, Scully?”

She shook her head.

 

31.  
She didn’t want to drive back to D.C. and so they stopped at the first motel they saw, Scully pulling into the gravel lot after Mulder. They got out of their cars, instinctively stretching.

“That was quick.”

“I have a sixth sense for shitty motels,” Mulder said, wiggling his fingers like divining rods.

Mulder waited outside as Scully checked herself in. Then he waited at the door with her as she unlocked it and went in. The bedspread was covered with jam-colored roses. She turned a lamp on, took her coat off, and sat down.

Mulder hovered in the doorway, scissoring the keys on his ring.

“Stay,” she said.

“The drive isn’t that bad—”

“Stay. It’s getting dark. It’s silly for you to drive back tonight.”

He nodded.

 

32.  
Mulder found a pizza place a few miles down the road. He was waiting in the lobby, idly reading corkboard flyers, when the truck from the highway pulled into the parking lot, its headlights bouncing across the plate glass. Shit. 

He went up to the counter. “Any chance of getting that pizza soon?”

The girl working the counter was chewing neon green gum, which seemed like it was probably a health code violation.

“Uh, whenever it’s done? It’s on a timer or whatever.”

She scraped at a spot of dried tomato sauce on the counter with her pale blue nail.

“Right.” Mulder drummed his fingers, glanced back at the parking lot. The truck. He was 95% sure it was the same truck. 94%.

“I’ll let you know when it’s done.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

He stepped to the side and didn’t look back as the cluster of bells above the door jangled.

The man ordered two large pizzas, extra cheese, extra pepperoni, extra sausage, and added a two liter of orange soda at the girl’s suggestion. He had a chapped, windblown face and curly hair. He stuck his wallet in his back pocket and tilted his head at Mulder.

“Cold out there.”

Mulder nodded.

“It’ll be warmer tomorrow. I can tell. My ankle gets tetchy.”

Mulder had never seen the guy before, but that didn’t mean anything. Haley wasn’t stupid. It was the same blue truck, wasn’t it? The front plate was missing.

“You know, my great-great-aunt was married to the owner of the original Puxatawney Phil.”

“No kidding.”

“So it runs in the family.”

“Well, I hope you’re right. About tomorrow.”

“Oh, I am.” He sat down on the bench to wait for his pizza, seemingly satisfied with himself. There was no way any of Haley’s guys could pull off an act like this. Right?

 

Scully turned on the TV while she waited. _Cheers_ was filmed before a live studio audience. The Weather Channel said it was raining in Atlanta and snowing in St. Paul. A round sun hovered over the desert southwest.

She couldn’t think of anything else to do but berate herself. An entire Saturday, ruined. Not even on a case and here she was in a motel, her bed sitting unused at home. What did she think she was going to find? She got some ice and two sodas from the machine and poured them into the glass tumblers from the bathroom sink.

For a moment, she thought about going to the lobby and paying for another room, for Mulder, but didn’t.

When he came in with the greasy pizza box, shrugging off his jacket, Scully handed him a watery Pepsi, like a sixties housewife ready with a whiskey on the rocks. Her inadvertent re-creation struck her as absurd. Her can of soda, her scrubby motel room, her Mulder.

While they ate, he told her about Jersey Devil sightings right there in southeastern Pennsylvania.

 

33.  
She went into the bathroom and he heard quiet movement, a zipper, fabric, then the squeak of pipes and water running in the tub. He wished he could fall asleep, nap in front of the TV, so he wouldn’t be waiting there expectantly when she came out, like some creep who’d just been _sitting_ there the whole time, listening to her in there, thinking about her naked, which, well, he sometimes did, but he wasn’t now. 

He watched most of an episode of _COPS_ before deciding she’d been in there too long. You could drown in an inch of water. Not to mention the things they’d seen come up a drainpipe.

He went to the window and looked out. There were five cars in the parking lot: his, Scully’s, and three others near the front office. No sign of the truck. He straightened the vinyl-backed curtains so there were no gaps and double-checked the dinged-up deadbolt.

 

The warped bathroom door was ajar, so when he said her name and she didn’t respond, he gently pushed it open.

Scully was sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Her pants were carefully folded on the counter and her legs were bare and longer than they had any right to be, skim milk blue against the clean white tub. Shallow water licked at her shins. 

“Scully?” he tried again. “You okay in here?”

“Yeah. I am, actually. Close the door, Mulder.”

He reached back and pushed it shut before he had a chance to let himself consider that maybe she wanted him to close it with him on the other side.

“Lock it, please.”

Her voice was calm as he clicked the lock.

He felt as though he’d been woken from a deep, dreamless sleep, and was still trying to form a landscape from pieces: a half-filled bathtub, a half-dressed Scully, and little else to go on.

She turned her head to the side, not so much to look at him but let him know she knew he was there.

He knelt down on the floor behind her, the rug slipping a little. Her legs were pebbled with goosebumps and her hair slid easily to the side.

The pale scar hovered above the clasp of her necklace. It was small, the size and shape of a fingernail clipping. He read it with his fingers.

“I’m alive, Mulder,” she said quietly.

He kissed her neck, pressed his tongue gently down against the scar and imagined he could feel the edges of the chip pressing back.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” she asked, and he shook his head slowly, the tip of his nose cold on her skin.

 

Her hair was smoky, late spring chill curling between the strands. Burnt bodies, gnarled like driftwood. Her head tilted back against his rough cheek.

It was Saturday night and he hadn’t shaved since Friday morning, when he put on his suit and tie and came to work, and now it was Saturday night and he was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt and she was in her underwear and a tan sweater that was soft as the underbelly of a leaf and which she probably wore to church and to her mother’s for dinner and they were locked in a tiny hothouse bathroom in a shitty motel on the side of the road in Nowhere Exactly, PA.

“What are you doing in here?” he said, his voice cracking a little.

“Thinking. My feet were cold.” What was she doing? What were they doing?

“The water can’t be very warm anymore.”

“Oh, it’s not.”

She turned around on the edge of the tub, dripping water, to face Mulder. She moved his right hand to her left knee. He breathed in sharply. She looked at him with an almost smile as she brushed his hair back. He put his left hand on her right knee.

She’d felt his hands before, of course. She remembered shaking his hand when she met him. She’d felt his hands on her face, in her hair, a finger tapping the back of her hand to get her attention in a meeting. His hand at the small of her back. But now, his palms flat on her thighs, one thumb rasping back and forth on the soft inside of her left knee and she thought: I have never felt his hands before at all.

 

She reached out for him, said his name, softly, his shirt balled in her fist, and their lips touched. She pushed him back or he pulled her down and either way, they landed together on the floor, Scully straddling him, her arms around his neck.

His elbow cracked the side of the tub on their graceless way down and she folded his arm carefully upwards to examine it.

“Are you okay?” Her fingers tiptoed around the wiggly bones.

“I’ll live.” He looked up at her, his head thunking back against the wall.

Mulder and his sad eyes, his baby-don’t-leave-me eyes.

“That’s good,” she said. Her damp fingers raked straight back through his hair, nails scratching his scalp. She felt powerful, taller than him on her knees. She felt bodied, understanding herself as a physical object for the first time in a long time.

“Scully,” he said, disbelieving. The tips of his fingers sneaked under the edge of her underwear and then they were kissing again, her hands gripping his jaw like he might stop.

When he moved his hands, the elastic snapped against her skin with a pleasant sting. She laughed because she couldn’t believe any of it. Not a single thing.

 

When she first met Mulder, she found him worryingly attractive. He knew how good he looked, yet he didn’t at all, which was worse than if he’d just been vain.

God, and he was always stretching, slivers of his stomach appearing from underneath t-shirts and sweaters, and she sometimes found herself wanting to draw a finger along the fine bones of his face, down the slope of his nose, without which he wouldn’t have been half so handsome. He would lean back in chairs, his neck open to her like a sign of submission. She wanted to sink her teeth in.

But he was Mulder. It had been five years going on six and he got worn in. He drove her crazy. He talked with food in his mouth when he was excited. She was always surprised when they’d be renting a car and the woman would fumble with the credit card and couldn’t seem to look away as Mulder scribbled his signature, touching the pen to his tongue to get the ink moving. Signing _Fox_ , for god’s sake. “Talk to me when he’s covered in bile,” she wanted to say. But she’d always touch the inside of his elbow then, and enjoy the fact that her one touch would cause him to immediately fold in on her, everything else disappearing from his periphery just because he wanted to see what she had to say.

And now, now she felt superior not just to Karen or Joyce at the Lariat desk, but to her younger self. All you could do was look—

 

Watching her face, waiting to be stopped, he slid his entire hand down the front of her underwear, palm up, the lace trim against his wrist.

“Oh my god,” she breathed as he moved three fingers up and down.

“I want to taste you.”

“Oh—” She felt like she was going to pass out. _I want to taste you_. Mulder saying that. Mulder saying that to her.

“I want to taste you, Scully, but there’s not any fucking room in this bathroom.” They were wedged against the tub. He still had his Timberlands on.

“I think—” she ground down, hard, against his hand. “I think it’s lucky, then, that we’re good at solving difficult problems as a team.”

“I knew it would come in handy sometime.”

 

Standing with her back against a motel bathroom door. Her fuzzy sweater half on. Mulder kneeling in front of her, her hands in his hair, one leg bent over his shoulder. Mulder was, she suspected, the kind of guy who would say, “I want to go down on you all night,” and truly mean it.

 

Mulder back on the floor, sitting against the wall, holding his own hard cock as she straddled him. This was such a bad idea, a bad bad bad idea, she’d sworn off getting involved with people she worked with, but this was _Mulder_ and he wasn’t really a coworker, not exactly, not really, because what a paltry way to describe him. She was already involved. This, right now, this revelatory moment when he slid into her, this was simpler, made more sense, than any of the other ways they were already involved.

 

From outside, there was the shrill ring of a cell phone.

“Your phone,” she said breathlessly, covering her bases, acting like it would be no big deal if he chose to end this right now, if he got up to answer it, like she didn’t want to burst into tears at the thought. She kept moving. “Mulder?”

He shook his head no, his forehead rocking back and forth against hers as his fingers circled where their bodies met.

“Oh, thank god.”

“Are you kidding me?” he whispered, and kissed her like they were on a sinking ship, like this was it. She pulled back to look at him.

“This,” she said, “This might be fraternization,” and he tilted his hips up a little so she’d gasp, which she did.

“I think it might be,” he said, pulling her closer—so this is what I have to do to get him to agree with me—“Oh, fuck, Scully.”

“Come here.” She rolled him on top of her, laughing. The tile cold on her back, Mulder’s pleasant weight on top of her. His jeans were still bunched around his knees and she used her foot to push them down.

“Your legs are too long. It’s taking forever to get your pants off.”

“Years.”

Maybe they should’ve moved to the bed but that would mean thought, that would mean decisions being made. This—

 

He’d always assumed, if it were to happen, that they’d both be wearing most of their clothes and that she would simply button up, straighten her skirt, and continue whatever discussion they’d been having, telling him about the neurological impossibility of telepathy or the nutritional dangers of canned soup.

Now, they were lying on the floor, half-naked, spent and breathing in counterpoint, her hand under his shirt, her head a fuzzy tangle at his shoulder, his hand cautiously stroking her back.

He didn’t expect Scully to love him. This didn’t change that.

(She didn’t expect Mulder to love her. This didn’t change that.)

Mulder hadn’t even meant to _like_ Scully, but he had, almost immediately and to his chagrin. From the first five minutes in his office, he knew he was in trouble.

It scared him a little, what he felt for her now, what he felt for her and what he was certain (not taking into account tonight, which he was sure was an anomaly) she didn’t quite feel for him. It filled every empty space in him, spaces he hadn’t known were empty until they were filled.

(She wanted to stay here forever, locked away, with him.)

She cares about me, he would have allowed, in her quietly fierce, sensible way. She is my partner.

But what he felt. It made the marrow of his bones ache. He had no idea what to do with it.

 

Out in his coat pocket, on the bed, his phone rang again.

“Jesus,” she said, half a laugh bitter in her mouth.

“Doesn’t Skinner have anything better to do on a Saturday night?”

“You should go answer it.”

As they sat up, getting dressed, not meeting each other’s eyes, Scully kneeled and bent to kiss him. She buried her face in his neck for a minute, her eyelashes wet.

A goodbye kiss, he knew that’s what it was.

(Don’t leave.)

 

“How’s your partner?” had been Haley’s opener.

“In the next room. Armed.” Mulder finished zipping up his jeans, hoping the telltale noise couldn’t be heard at the other end of the line. He rubbed his mouth, fingers coming away lipstick-tinted.

“I like a woman who knows how to handle a gun.” Oh, sex with Scully had possibly ruined his ability to appreciate innuendo.

“What do you want.”

“Just checking in. Making sure your case isn’t going to take any longer than you thought.”

“I’ll be back in D.C. on Monday.”

“Good. You know, Mr. Mulder, just for future reference, I’m the kind of guy who likes to be kept in the loop. Call me nosy.”

“I’ll remember that. I’m thinking about a bagel for breakfast, but I’ll give you a ring, let you know what I decide. I could go donut.”

 

Scully came out carrying her boots and set them at the foot of the bed. Her hair was tucked behind her ears and her face was flushed. She sat down and put her socks back on.

“Skinner?” she said, pointing at the phone.

He looked dumbly at the black piece of plastic.

“On the phone? Was it Skinner?”

“Oh. No.” He scratched behind his ear, smoothed down his hair. “It was my mom.”

“Oh. How is she?”

“Good. You know.” He shrugged and tossed the phone on the bed.

He knew she had to be, if not suspicious, at least curious. They left each other well enough alone, didn’t prod too much. It would take a hell of a lot more for her to start asking questions. Snooping, spying, not her style.

Still. Two secretive, late night phone calls, taken in her presence and not explained, that was unlike him and they both knew it and were pretending not to. This was a seed, waiting in the back of her head. It would bloom.

 

34.  
She took the bed and he took the chair. They had some kind of bizarre Victorian sense of propriety. 

“Are you asleep?” 1:42 a.m.

“Never,” he said. A truck had pulled into a spot about 25 feet away from their door at midnight and stayed half an hour. In the dark, he couldn’t tell if it was blue or green. A lot of people drove trucks, especially here. He memorized the plate so he could run it when they got back to D.C.

“Are you cold? You have to be cold,” she said. “Come here.”

It felt dicey. He was trying to act normal, because she was apparently taking the tack of ignoring the fact that, hours earlier, she’d been biting his neck while he fucked her on the floor of a motel bathroom. Well, at least they weren’t technically on a case.

But he was cold, she was right, and she already had the blankets peeled back. It would be rude to say no. He crawled in but gave her space. She reached over and placed a hand on his turned cheek, pressed soft circles into his jaw. He clenched it, the way he always did when he was angry or nervous or sad.

“You okay?” he said.

“Uh huh.”

“Really?”

She wasn’t sure if he was still worried about her trip to Ruskin Dam or if he was trying to be gentlemanly, gauge if there was going to be fallout from tonight. She sometimes underestimated the extent to which he needed her to be okay, the way a tilt in her axis could send him spinning ever outwards.

“I feel like I’m being held hostage. If I can get in the car and drive to another state without knowing it—”

“Today?”

“No. But it happened that night. Mulder, I don’t know how I got there. And I came out of it by the grace of who the hell knows. What happens when my luck runs out?”

He laughed.

“What?”

“Luck, Scully. The idea that either of us possess anything even remotely resembling luck.”

“We’re still here, aren’t we? Mulder, it’s just… as long as this thing is in my neck, whose body is this? Whose brain is this? If someone else can flick a switch…”

“You don’t want to—I mean, are you thinking about—”

“No,” she said. “No. Faith is one thing. I don’t know that I want to prove it.”

If she’d asked, he’d have sliced it out himself. But he was glad she didn’t. He really didn’t care what had saved her. Despite it all, he was okay never knowing, as long as she stayed saved. Prayer, technology—the ends were the thing, fuck the means.

“Did you find what you were looking for today? Out here?”

“I guess I wanted to see it with my own eyes.”

“Doubting Thomas,” he said.

“Actually, Mulder, you’ve always reminded me of him.”

“Haven’t you heard? I believe in everything.”

“You’d definitely stick your hand in someone’s side.”

“I’m endlessly interested in the world,” he said. She huffed a laugh.

“I didn’t want to have to rely on an X-File to tell me what I’d done. On some embarrassing hypnosis tape. I thought I could find the answers and move on.”

She threw her arm against her eyes, feeling the heat in her cheeks rise at the thought of the tape. She hated that Skinner had heard it. Mulder was one thing, but her boss?

The problem: it all seemed made up. A tall tale. She wondered, more than ever, how the people they met, all across this wide and bumpy country, managed to hold onto their crazy stories for so long. How he had, for so long.

“I want to find the answers for you.”

“Maybe sometimes there aren’t answers, Mulder, no matter how much we want there to be.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

She sat up suddenly, arms around her knees.

“Mulder.”

He sat up, too, confused.

“I haven’t been entirely truthful with you.”

His stomach dropped, the way your stomach drops when you hear bad news or when you’re in the throes of new love. Two feelings that press up close next to each other.

“There was a woman named Marjorie. Marjorie Eldritch. She lived in Glen Burnie with her husband, John Eldritch. Until last November, when John went missing on his way home from his job as a government contractor.”

“A government contractor doing what?”

“Unclear. He’s suspiciously absent from available government records. And then in March, Marjorie drove to Ruskin Dam.”

“Is she dead?”

“Yes. I found a key card at her house.”

“You went to her house? Did you break in?”

She nodded.

“Scully.” He was a little impressed.

“I’m dropping it, Mulder. It’s dropped.”

“What about the key card?”

“I had Byers try to read it. Nothing.”

“You think the husband is dead?”

“Probably.”

“You could’ve been hurt, Scully.”

“I wasn’t.”

“I would’ve gone with you.”

“I don’t need you to protect me, Mulder.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“I’m fine! Nothing happened.”

“But something could’ve! You could’ve been hurt. At least if I were there, I could’ve gotten hurt instead.”

She laughed, finally, and he took her face in his hands. She looped her hands around his wrists.

“I wanted to do it alone. Because if we did it together, I guess then that made it an X-File. I made me an X-File. Again.”

“So what now?”

“Nothing. It’s over. I’ve realized that I was right from the beginning. I wouldn’t feel better if I found the men who did this to me. I wouldn’t feel better if I killed them.”

“I would.”

She gave him a look.

“I really, truly would, Scully.”

“Nobody needs to kill anybody, Mulder. There’s enough of that.”

 

As they got into their separate cars in the morning, balancing Styrofoam cups of coffee, Mulder reached out and pressed down the collar of her coat, blown by the wind. It was warmer already. He told her to get some rest, that he’d see her Monday.

“You, too,” she said. “Rest, I mean.”

“Yeah,” he said, stretching a long leg into the car. “You know me. Restful’s my middle name.”

“As if Fox weren’t enough.”

35.  
He stood outside the office on the fifth floor and made a deal. He’d knock and if she didn’t answer within one minute, he could leave. He would knock and count to sixty. He had an appointment, sure, but maybe she wouldn’t be there. 

“Agent Mulder. Come in.”

Fifteen seconds? She didn’t even make it interesting. He nodded hello and slouched inside.

She was in her fifties and had grave eyes, like she’d seen everything terrible the world had to offer and would not be impressed with whatever you’d come to lay at her feet.

 

A week earlier, Skinner had seen them in the hallway, waiting to go into a briefing. In a dim corner, Mulder had been sitting on a discarded table with empty, beat-up bankers boxes at one end and Scully had been standing in the wide V of his sharpshooter, outlaw legs, reading him the results of a lab test.

Scully had looked up at him, her tongue darting at the edge of her mouth, and he’d put his hand on her elbow, laughing. Then he saw Skinner out of the corner of his eye, watching them as he went into the conference room.

The next day, Skinner handed him a business card with KAREN KOSSEFF, LCSW embossed on the front, under a blue and gold Bureau crest. On the back he’d written 2:30 Tuesday.

“You cannot tell Agent Scully. Anything. Have I made myself clear, Agent Mulder?”

Common opinion, apparently, was that he was a weak man.

“Talk to her,” Skinner said, tapping the card.

“Would you?”

“This isn’t a conversation, Agent.”

Scully thought he was at the dentist.

 

Karen Kosseff, LCSW was comfortable with silence. She listened to agents bullshit her all day long. She waited.

 

When he was sent back to school that January for the second half of sixth grade, he was also sent to see Dr. Gersh. Dr. Gersh had a boxful of puppets with scratched up eyes and he was a nut for checkers. Mulder knew the second fact because Dr. Gersh had told him. “Fox, I’m a nut for checkers. How about a game?”

Did that really work on any of the other sad kids?

Maybe Dr. Gersh thought that one day, Mulder would shout “King me!” and be cured. It didn’t seem possible that they’d let you become a doctor if you were that stupid. Checkers!

Mulder was certain of one thing, even at twelve, and that was that there was no such thing as a cure. Healing was impossible, and if you were guilty, well, then, you had no business even seeking it out.

But every Monday and Wednesday afternoon, from 3:15 to 4:00, Fox Mulder and Dr. Gersh played checkers.

No one seemed to remember the red and black Stratego board that had been on the living room floor that night, and Mulder never brought it up, just dutifully crisscrossed his plastic pieces from one side to the other. Samantha used to sandwich checkers together to pretend like they were Oreos.

He’d saved the Stratego board while men, people his father seemed to know, tromped around their house, and while his mother had the beginnings of what his dad called “a little something.”

“Your mother’s going through a little something, Fox. Why don’t you go outside for awhile, huh?”

He carried the board flat, carefully not to tip the tiny pieces over, and put it on the floor at the end of his bed. He thought he’d have to make excuses for it when his mom came in to take dirty clothes out of his hamper, but she didn’t do that anymore.

 

Finally, Kosseff spoke.

“Why do you think Assistant Director Skinner asked us to talk, Agent Mulder?”

He shook his head and shrugged.

“I understand that you’re on a difficult assignment. Is the assignment bothering you, Agent Mulder?”

“Bothering me?”

She raised her eyebrows, like she’d done research on the best way to get him to talk. He wiped sweaty palms on his knees.

“No more than anything else.”

“Well, then I guess the question is how much you’re bothered by everything else.”

Mulder laughed and Kosseff just barely smiled, indulging him for a moment.

“Let me be more specific. Does it bother you that you can’t tell your partner what you’re doing? Does it bother you that you have to keep things from her?”

She kept her pen capped, made no motion toward her pad of paper.

“That’s the assignment." 

“And you’re here because you’ve been assigned to talk to me. Is that right?”

“Two for two.”

 

Kosseff had guiltily, unprofessionally, been looking forward to this appointment since the previous Friday afternoon, when it appeared on her calendar. Fox Mulder. His reputation, as it were, preceded him. He was mythological. Not to mention his small, flinty partner and the way she talked about him. Even when she was dying. Especially as she was dying, right at his side the whole damn time.

 

“Okay. So let’s start there. Why do you think the Assistant Director asked you to talk to me?”

“Told,” he said. “And the Assistant Director thinks I’m going to tell Scully. Hell, he probably thinks she’s known for weeks.”

“Has she?”

“I haven’t told her a fucking thing.”

He leaned back. This wasn’t a point of pride, Kosseff realized, not telling her. He was ashamed to have followed his orders so resolutely.

“And do you want to tell her?”

“Yes,” he said. “Do you know how many times I’ve gotten _this_ close? And it’s not just because—not because I hate lying to her. But because she would be an asset to the operation, and I think Skinner is putting us both in unnecessary danger by keeping it from her.”

“Do you think it’s possible that the Assistant Director knows things about the situation that you don’t? That perhaps he _does_ have your best interests in mind?”

“Skinner—” He stopped himself. “They make such a big deal about partnership, you know? About trust. I’ve gone over and over and over it, and I cannot come up with anything. Safety is one thing. But lying to your partner. For months. That’s another thing altogether. And when it’s all over, and she knows—”

He rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t meant to say this much.

“Don’t you think Agent Scully might understand the situation? That she’ll understand you were following a specific order for a reason?”

“Sure. Sure, yeah. She’ll understand. But that won’t change the fact that I’ll have lied to her. To her face. Every day. No amount of understanding will change that.”

 

“I trust him with my life,” she remembered Agent Scully saying. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping.

 

36.  
The postcard had been slipped under her door. On the front was the Lincoln Memorial at night. On the back, an address written in block letters. 

She was in her pajamas when Mulder got there, somehow still looking professional in gray cotton and bare feet, hair damp at the edges.

“You’re sure it wasn’t there when you got home?”

“No. I took a shower and I was in there for twenty minutes, thirty, tops. It was on the floor when I came out.”

“What do you think the address is?” he said lightly, already knowing the answer, playing the game she wanted him to play.

“Well, I think Marjorie’s stolen key card will probably get us in.”

“I think so, too.”

 

Creature comforts made you slow and dull. Sometimes Scully wanted to be a person who could take a hot shower, watch a dumb sitcom, drink some tea, and be asleep by ten. She’d been trying to be that person tonight. What if she hadn’t gone back out to the kitchen for the tea? What if the phone had rung and she didn’t look down at the floor? What if Queequeg were still alive and had eaten the postcard before she had a chance to see it? She’d be in bed right now, reading a book, cozy under the covers. Instead, here she was, putting her shoes back on and picking up her coat and her gun and an unmarked key card she’d stolen from a dead woman’s house.

She felt a jolt of adrenaline when she saw the postcard. Someone had been right outside while she was in the shower. And she felt the same jolt as she and Mulder tripped down the stairs together, out to his car, the hood still warm to the touch.

It would be easier to be in bed. Slow and dull. But she wanted to know. The two of them always wanted to know.

 

The address took them to an office park a twenty minute drive from Scully’s place in Georgetown. It was 9:30 by the time they were on the road and traffic was light.

The office park was well kept, the polite beiges of suburbia with trimmed bushes in the front. They parked across the street, even though there didn’t seem to be any security around the buildings. No visible cameras, an open parking lot without a gate, no chain link fences. Probably not aesthetically pleasing.

On one end of the complex there was a dental office. “You deserve a smile!” it said beneath the dentist’s name. On the other, an HVAC repair place. In the middle, the glass door was blank, save for the suite number, which matched the back of their postcard.

“Go for it,” Mulder said when they got to the door.

Scully took the silver key card and swiped it through the sensor. A green light, then the door clicked and sighed. She pushed it open with her body, careful not to leave prints on the glass.

There was a small pile of mail on the floor, beneath the mail slot. Mulder picked it up and flipped through it. It was all junk, coupons, ads, addressed to Occupant or Friendly Neighbor.

The lobby could’ve been anywhere in America. It was very clean, with a row of chairs lined up against the front window. A water cooler burbled in the corner. The only sign of life was a dusty peace lily plant. The reception desk was empty. The carpet smelled new.

Behind the desk, Scully put her gloves on and pulled the filing cabinet drawers out. Mulder aimed a flashlight in, revealing emptiness. They went through every drawer and cabinet in the reception area and it was all the same.

 

Down a hallway at the right of the lobby, there were four individual offices. The nameplates were empty and the doors were standing wide open, revealing small, square offices that smelled of fake lemon and bleach. Vacuum marks were chevroned into the carpet.

“What do you think?” Mulder said as they stood in the fourth office. “Do you think he worked here?”

“I think they did a good job cleaning up, didn’t they?”

 

It got darker the further away from the front they got. An exit sign glowed green above a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“Do your thing, Scully.”

She swiped again and opened the door into a small warehouse, dimly lit by emergency lights. Mulder clicked his flashlight on and arced it over the floor as he walked to the center of the room.

“Look at this,” he said. “You can tell there were fixtures here. They tore everything up.”

He pointed the light at spots on the floor.

“You think this is where they manufactured them?” She involuntarily scrunched her shoulders, thinking of her own chip. Welcome home.

“And right on the other side of the wall, they’re doing root canals.”

Mulder crouched down, examining a rough spot in the floor. And as he did, Scully heard footsteps in the corner. She drew her Sig and turned, leveling it at Alex Krycek’s head.

“This is the thanks I get, Agent Scully?”

“Shut up and don’t move, Krycek.”

Mulder stood slowly and walked toward them, trying not to break into a run. She might do it. Tonight, she might do it.

“Hey. Scully,” he said in a voice that he hoped wasn’t patronizing.

She kept her eyes and her gun trained on Krycek, who was lazily following her orders, but didn’t seem too concerned about what she might do.

“Hey, Scully.”

“Why don’t you point that gun somewhere else so we can talk?” Krycek said.

“Shut. Up.”

“Yeah, Krycek, shut the fuck up. Scully.” Mulder touched her arm and leaned close, his voice dropping so Krycek couldn’t hear. This is just for you, not for show, Scully. “Come on. We’re not going to get any answers like this. Okay?”

“I thought you wanted to kill people, Mulder,” she whispered back, still staring at Krycek.

“Well, someone I always listen to told me that enough people have died. Right?”

Her breath hitched slightly, then went out in a puff. She lowered the gun.

 

“What do you know about the chips?”

“Not much. The technology’s new. It’s not perfect. Pennsylvania was a test.”

“For bigger things,” Mulder said.

“Maybe.”

“You said it’s not perfect. What does that mean?”

“It’s supposed to do two things, as far as I can tell. It cures a very specific type of cancer and it serves as a sort of homing device. But sometimes it does one and not the other. Sometimes it doesn’t do either.”

“So all of these people, all of these deaths,” Scully spit out, “it’s all been a test.”

“You have to break a few eggs.”

Scully moved fast, shoving Krycek against the wall, her arm pressing against his neck. He was caught off guard.

Mulder moved toward them. “Scully—”

She held her hand up at Mulder: don’t come any further. Then she stepped away from Krycek, giving him a shove as she backed off.

“You’re a real piece of shit,” she said with a smile.

“So if this is the plan,” Mulder said, playing the straight man for once, “that also means killing the people who made the chips. Like the owner of our key card.”

“Who said he’s dead?”

Scully was sick of riddles and half answers. “If he’s not dead, then where is he?”

“Maybe he just wanted a new life. Haven’t you ever wanted a new life?”

“Did his wife have a chip in her neck?”

“Was she an abductee?” Mulder asked.

“She was a control subject.”

“Well, she’s dead,” Scully said flatly. “On the bridge in Pennsylvania.”

“Like I said. That happens.”

Scully’s hand went to her gun.

“Hey, I’m just the messenger.”

“Why, though?” said Mulder. “Why bring us here? Why lead us to Wiekamp?”

“You two keep things interesting. Anyway, the project is being put on ice. Look at this place. It’ll be an insurance office in a month.”

 

They sat in Mulder’s car, across the street.

“If they’re turning off the lights on this project…” Mulder ventured.

“I know what you’re thinking. Is it the chip itself or is it what the chip’s being told to do.”

He sniffed, nodded, clenched his jaw. Tough guy shit. What if she died.

“I think,” she said, “that any of us could get cancer at any time. Not just me. I mean, we could get in an accident on the way home. A garbage truck could cut us off. A deer could run in front of the car. But I’m alive right now. Okay?”

She reached over and took his hand off the steering wheel, kissed it, then put it back.

“I’m ready to go home.”

37.  
The days got longer and warmer. It rained. She couldn’t sleep. And Scully could sleep anywhere. Airport gates, rental sedans, anywhere. There was still something bothering her. It wasn’t the chip. It wasn’t the empty warehouse. There was a last missing puzzle piece. It was Mulder. It felt like he was avoiding her. And maybe that was about the motel in Pennsylvania, but she thought it was something more. 

Always a lone wolf, he was disappearing more frequently. He wasn’t where he said he’d be. He said he was going to see the Gunmen. When she called over there like a wife who was being cheated on, they said they hadn’t seen him. She played dumb, “Oh, I just thought he might be there.” She drove past the gym where he played basketball. He seemed to be talking to his mom with much more frequency. Teena Mulder never struck her as the kind of mom who loved to chat. He scheduled checkups at the dentist, the doctor. Mulder, who thought of a health plan as zinc lozenges and Campbell’s soup.

She’d woken up in his apartment that Friday night and he’d been gone. Where? A small, jealous part of her wondered if there was someone else. But how could there be a someone else? You had to be something in order for there to be a someone else. The night after that had been Pennsylvania.

 

She was in the office by herself when the phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line stuttered for a moment when she answered the phone. Then he cleared his throat and asked for Mulder.

“He’s not here right now. Can I take a message?”

“No-no-no, no message. Thanks. Thanks.” The line clicked and went dead. Scully looked at the receiver in her hand.

Their phone lines were always tapped, probably. And Mulder got plenty of phone calls from people who’d read about him or heard about him and just knew, they just knew, that he would be the one to understand the terrible predicament they’d found themselves in.

So this was probably that. Someone far away who’d finally worked up the nerve to call this lone hope in the basement of the FBI about an alien abduction and then panicked when the right person didn’t answer the phone.

She’d come extremely close, the last few days, to digging through the pockets of his coat, digging through his piles of paper, calling the last number he’d called on his mobile phone. She felt paranoid and on edge.

She had the call traced. It had come from a payphone at the corner of 10th and F. A block away.

The rattling elevators were always reluctant to make the trip down to the basement. And so by the time she got up to the lobby and outside, then ran north on 10th, past the fanny-packed tourists in front of the Hard Rock Café and Ford’s Theatre, there was no one there.

 

38.  
Guilt smelled like wood polish and frankincense. 

On the other side of the latticed partition was a young voice, younger than her. Fresh out of the seminary. What would make someone choose that life now? It seemed anachronistic, Old World.

“I’m not sure how best to explain this,” Scully started, choosing her words carefully. “I work in government and there’s… context that I can’t really provide. Even to you.”

“Go ahead. I’ll let you know if I have questions. But only if they’re necessary.”

He had a kind voice. If he hadn’t chosen the priesthood, he might’ve been a teacher, the kind that kids loved because he didn’t try too hard to be cool. The older women in the parish, the ones who took turns dusting the pews on Saturdays, probably loved him, too.

“Trust is an important part of my job. It’s absolutely crucial. And I’m finding…”

Scully stopped, wanting to put this the right way, for this anonymous man on the other side of the wall. Not wanting to make herself look too overbearing or make Mulder look guilty.

“I’m finding it hard to trust someone I need to trust. Someone who I usually trust without question and without fear.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“I lied to him. For… a while.”

“And now you believe he’s lying to you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you feel guilt about lying to him?”

“Yes.”

“Have you talked to him about this at all?”

“No. I mean, I came clean, I told him the truth. He forgave me. But I haven’t asked him about what I think he might be keeping from me.”

“Are you concerned about this from a professional standpoint?”

“I can’t really discuss any of the particulars—”

“No, I know. But it seems to me that you can look at this in two ways. From an ethical, professional view—is he doing something that could harm others at work? And from a personal view. Do you have a personal relationship with him?”

“Yes.”

“When we’re not truthful with those who are closest to us, we break our connection with them.”

She nodded, even though he couldn’t see her, and chewed the inside of her mouth.

“Have you considered that you’re projecting your own guilt onto him?”

“I have.”

“And would it make you feel better about your own lies if he were lying to you?”

Scully laughed. “A little bit, yeah.”

“I think… that we can only be available for other people when we first take care of ourselves. The spiritual equivalent of putting your own mask on before helping anyone else as the plane goes down. I’m assuming that your relationship with him is important to you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here, asking me about it. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Here’s what I want you to do: Forgive yourself.”

“Couldn’t you just give me a few Hail Marys?”

“And once you’ve forgiven yourself, really forgiven yourself, you need to talk to him. “

 

39.  
Cherry blossoms covered the paths in Folger Park like a bride’s veil. 

Mulder knew where the cameras were. He waited an extra second as Haley drove away from the curb. It would be over soon.

 

40.  
It bloomed white hot in her head. Right where the cancer had been, she thought. She felt blinded by her anger. Sick. 

She forgave him and forgave him and forgave him. She trusted him. He’d made a fool of her. She knew that he’d been somewhere dark. That he didn’t have the strength of his old beliefs guiding him. But to think that without them, this is where the compass would point?

_You let me be taken. I had a baby. She died. They killed her. They killed me but I didn’t die. Chemotherapy works by injecting poison into your veins. My sister’s blood on my hardwood floor. I covered the spot with a rug. Ruskin Dam. Pennsylvania. The motel room. The way you say my name. What we might’ve been. How things could’ve been. All gone gone gone gone—_

He stood at the curb and let a terrorist drive away.

 

41.  
She sat across from him on the coffee table, holding the ice to his hand. She had a headache, now that the double adrenaline rush of learning about Mulder’s betrayal and his innocence had subsided. She felt wrung out. 

“How long?”

“They approached me when I was in Boston. I wanted to tell you, Scully.”

“I know.”

“They knew everything from the start. They knew about you. If I’d done anything, if I’d made one wrong move, they would’ve…”

“I know what they do.”

He experimentally flexed his hand, wincing. “Do you think it’s broken?”

“Probably. Did they do anything else do you?”

She set the ice down and squeezed his arms, feeling up and down for anything out of order. He shook his head no.

“You need sleep.”

“Yeah, right.”

 

She taped up his fingers in the bathroom with a splint he had in the cabinet from an old basketball injury.

“I was suspicious of you because I’d been lying to you,” she said.

“But you had reason to be suspicious.”

“I like to keep things to myself.” She folded her arms as she leaned in the doorway.

“I’ve noticed.”

“But that usually doesn’t mean lying, I hope you know that.”

“Scully, you’re probably the most truthful person I’ve ever met.”

Mulder popped open a bottle of Advil and shook some out, before bending to the sink for a gulp of water. She took two, using the cup with his toothbrush in it.

“I’m not perfect.”

“I didn’t say you were.” Mulder wiped his mouth with the back of his arm and slipped past her, out into his bedroom. “Are you okay?” He pointed at the Advil.

“Headache. Really, Mulder, you need to get some sleep. What time do you have to be there?”

“Six. When’s the last time you slept?”

“I don’t have to participate in a bank robbery in the morning.”

“If they find out—”

“Mulder—”

“No, Scully, it’s something to consider. And I wouldn’t put it past them to do it during the operation, right there in the bank.”

“You’ll have backup.”

“Not inside.”

“I don’t trust the task force, Mulder. Skinner, maybe, but Leamus? The CIA? They’re using you. What if they’ve been using you all along?”

“Well, they can join the club, I guess.”

He sat down on the edge of his bed in the muddled light. She stayed in the doorway, backlit by the warm yellow bulb over the mirror. He thought of an art history class he took in college. A gold leaf halo on a Renaissance saint.

“Mulder. Last year. Were you—did you think I was going to die?”

He raised his face to her. The answer was plain. He nodded.

 

Later, after Haley had run off the road, Mulder would never tell her how close he’d come. On his knees, with ripped plastic sheeting snapping in the wind like ghosts. The man next to him, falling forward as the shot rang out. It could’ve been him. Bremer letting him go—what were the chances.

Knowing Scully, when the time came, she’d insist on doing his autopsy, so it was the least he could do to die from something that wasn’t going to rip his body apart.

 

42.  
It is as it ever was and ever will be. There would always be danger, as long as they were doing this. Small lulls in the middle of the night had to be hoarded and held close. A breath before jumping back in. 

 

43.  
She left his apartment a little after three. At the door, she fussed with his hand some more, giving him the chance to complain about her hurting him. 

“We’ll get it x-rayed tomorrow.”

“If there is a tomorrow,” he said gravely. A joke at the end of the world.

She wrapped her arms around him and he leaned his chin on the top of her head.

“Just be careful,” she said, feeling his ribs rise and fall. She felt him nod against her and that was enough. They could only try.

 

44.  
There’s a photograph pinned to the bulletin board in their office. Scully put it there. Scully, who could sometimes be unsentimental to the point of cruelty. 

A crime scene photographer at an office building in Newark took it, testing out her flash before crouching down to catalogue the business of death that had brought them all there.

It was how they looked from the outside, a closed loop like the snake on her back.

They were both wearing boxy Bureau-issue jackets. Scully always swam in them, even the smallest size. They were reading from one sheaf of papers in Mulder’s hand and Scully’s hair looked very red.

She knew Mulder had noticed it, because he noticed everything. Scully thought of it as a pure distillation of their work into one frame. It made her miss it even as she was doing it, working a case, breaking down a lead. Nostalgia for the present that would, one day, be past. The Germans surely had a name for it.

In the photo, it is as it ever was and ever will be. The same instinct that led her to Marjorie Eldritch’s house and the same reason that he agreed to throw in with the New Spartans. To take the journey without hope of ever getting the answers you desire.

“YOU ARE HERE.”

Scully scribbled it on a yellow post-it and stuck it on the flying saucer next to the picture. You are here. Mulder and Scully. As it ever was and ever will be.

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this not quite ten years ago, somewhere in the post-IWTB lull, before season 10 was a twinkle in anyone’s eye. It’s always had the same general structure, but at a certain point back then, I hit a wall and never figured out how to get around it. So it remained as a print out in a file folder that I would occasionally run into when I was looking for something or cleaning. I still thought about Mulder and Scully, but I figured my fan fiction days were over. I was retired. Then season 11 flicked the proverbial switch. It was good again. They were them again. Even Gillian’s wig had more enthusiasm this time around. And so I picked this story up and started working. I loved writing it and I hope you like it, too.
> 
> Thanks, as always, to coast, meatfight, and leucocrystal, who are still here and still giving wonderful notes and are the best email friends in the world. They kept me honest (made me a whole person) when it came to commas, typos, Mulder’s missing dining room, and bathtub water temperature.
> 
> Thanks, also, to the inimitable Penumbra, because "Parabiosis" was never far from mind as I was writing this and I hope that my journey through season 5 is even half as good as her season 7.


End file.
